The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only)

by Diane Purkiss

  The assembly of ministers convened to reform the Church decided in November that only the Lord’s Day should be a holy day, and in December 1644 the crunch came when the monthly fast day clashed with Christmas; Parliament decisively backed the fast day. On 19 December, an ordinance was passed insisting that the fast day should continue as normal but ‘with the more solemn humiliation because it may call to remembrance our sins, and the sins of our forefathers, who have turned this feast, pretending the memory of Christ, into an extreme forgetfulness of him, by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights’. The sermon given to Parliament stressed the triumph of the monthly fast over the festival: ‘the highest festival of all the year to meet with our monthly fast and be subdued by it’. Ironically, this used exactly the language of Christmas battles between villages. But preachers were told to secure some ‘fire and plum pottage’ for those who had missed the traditional fun.

  Parliament kept up its offensive. On 4 January 1645 it issued the new Directory for the Public Worship of God. This reinforced the new status quo of Sunday-only holy days, fasts, and occasional celebrations of military triumphs. The last involved listening to long sermons, just like the others, but with something to eat beforehand. But of course all these directives could only be enforced in the parts of the country controlled by Parliament, and even there the Directory wasn’t distributed till August 1645. The first real trial of strength was therefore over Christmas; Easter and Whitsun, being Sundays, could still be more-or-less observed, and no one seemed to mind much about the loss of saints’ days. But Christmas most often fell on a weekday, in a calendar now centred on Sundays and fast days. A further ordinance in June 1647 abolished Christmas, Easter and Whitsun, and substituted as a regular holiday for students, apprentices and servants the second Tuesday of every month. The government rounded up a number of clergy for trying to preach on Christmas Day, including one who published his sermon under the provocative title The Stillborn Nativity.

  The attack on Christmas actually licensed some popular violence. In 1643, mobs of apprentices in several towns forced any open shops to close, as they did in Bury St Edmunds in 1646, resulting in a scuffle and some injuries. The following year in Norwich, there were petitions from godly ministers trying to hurry reform through the mayor’s office, and from apprentices angry that there had been any reform at all. In Ipswich, too, there was trouble when those who wanted to celebrate Christmas formed ‘a great mutiny’ and in 1647 there was trouble over the Christmas decorations that some city porters had draped around the conduit in Cornhill. The mayor and corporation assembled to take them down, and a crowd assembled to prevent them; one man ended up in Newgate. The shops in London continued, determinedly, to close, and the taverns were by contrast full. Godly Ezekiel Woodward admitted that ‘the people go on holding fast to their heathenish customs and abominable idolatries, and think they do well’. Change was also strongly resisted; when a group of people violently attacked excisemen and their escort of soldiers at Chippenham in 1647, it was New Year’s Eve; some of the attackers used disguise, suggesting a festive link.

  The fiercest battles were in Kent. In Canterbury, the county committee outlawed Christmas in 1647, and in response a huge crowd gathered to demand a church service and to enforce the closure of shops and businesses. Predictably, fights broke out, and the mayor’s house was attacked. A crowd ‘threw up and down the wares’ of those few shop-keepers who obeyed the mayor’s order to open for business, while others set up holly in their doorways and gave out free drinks. They also got out that ancient symbol of rebellion and misrule, the football. For some weeks, the city was controlled by the rioters; they adopted the slogan ‘for God, King Charles and Kent’, uniting a festive religious calendar to Royalism. In early January they were forced to surrender, but less than six months later Kent was thickly involved in the Second Civil War.

  As with any dispute, too, the press was active, and a pamphlet controversy developed. It began with a debate about the date of Christmas. A Royalist pamphlet printed at Oxford, by Edward Fisher, entitled The Feast of Feasts, asserted that 25 December was the right day; this was part of an intellectual debate, and he also insisted that his readers should ‘hold the traditions which we have been taught, let us make them known to our children’. In December 1647 came A Ha Christmas, which stressed the charitable aspect of Christmas, ‘those who God almighty hath given a good share of the wealth of this world may wear the best, eat and drink the best with moderation, so that they remember God’s poor members with mercy and charity, and this year requireth more charity than ordinary because of the dearness of provision’. A Canterbury cleric, Robert Palmer, wrote that continued opposition to Christmas might create resentment which their enemies could harness ‘as a fair cloak to put on for to begin a quarrel’. What he said was plausible because some Kentish rioters the previous year had begun their rebellion with a demonstration of Christmas tradition. Robert Skinner, by contrast, argued on the other side that Christmas was just the pagan festival of the Saturnalia and that customs like Yule games and carols were relics of that pagan rite. Thomas Mockett argued the same thing the following year, in his Christmas, The Christian’s Grand Feast, ‘all the heathenish customs and pagan rites and ceremonies that the idolatrous heathen used, as riotous drinking, health drinking, gluttony, luxury, wantonness, dancing, dicing, stage-plays, interludes, masques, mummeries, with all other pagan sports and profane practices into the Church of God’. This was a fairly obvious attack on the court in particular. In January 1649, Edward Fisher re-entered the debate, republishing his old pamphlet under the title A Christian Caveat to the Old and New Sabbatarians, defending Yule sports with a new appendix arguing that ‘the body is God’s as well as the spirit, and therefore why should not God be glorified by showing forth the strength, quickness and agility of our body … to eat mince pies, plum pottage or brawn in December, to trim churches or private houses with holly or ivy about Christmas, to stick roasting pieces of beef with rosemary or to stick a sprig of rosemary in a collar of brawn, to play cards or bowls, to hawk or to hunt, to give money to servants or to apprentices a box [a gift], or to send a couple of capons or any other present to a friend during the twelve days’. It sold some 6000 copies, and was reissued five times. Later writers followed Fisher’s lead, arguing that Christmas rituals were visual symbols of the sacred, especially for the illiterate. This was a conspicuously Laudian line, and so there was a predictably angry response; Ezekiel Woodward, the minister of Bray, wrote a pamphlet whose title summed up his thesis: Christmas Day The Old Heathen’s Feasting Day. Less learned pamphlets, like The Arraignment, Conviction and Imprisoning of Christmas, printed by Simon Minced-Pie for Cicely Plum Pottage, took the form of a quarrel between a town-crier and a Royalist gentlewoman who was enquiring after Father Christmas’s whereabouts. ‘Since the Catholic liquor is taken from him, he is much wasted’, says the crier, and ‘is now constrained to remain in the Popish quarters’. The woman replies: ‘If ever the Catholics or bishops rule again in England, they will set the church doors open on Christmas Day, and we shall have mass at the High Altar as was used when the day was first instituted, and not have the holy Eucharist barred out of school, as school boys do their masters against the festival. What, shall we have our mouths shut to welcome old Christmas. No, no, bid him come by night over the Thames, and we will have a back door open to let him in. I will myself give him his diet for one year to try his fortune, this time twelve months may prove better.’

  John Taylor gloomily described the abandonment of Christmas festivities in the ‘schismatical and rebellious towns’ of London, Yarmouth, Newbury and Gloucester, where Christmas came and went with ‘no sign or token of any holy day. The shops were open, the markets were full, the watermen rowing, the carmen were a loading and unloading … all the liberty and harmless sports, with the merry gambols dances and friscals by which the toiling plowswain and labourer were wont to be recreated and their spirits and hopes revived for a whole twelve month a
re now extinct and put out of use in such a fashion as if they had never been.’ Taylor especially saw Christmas as the festival of the poor; in a later pamphlet he wrote of the Devon people, ‘the poor labouring hands and maid servants with the ploughboys went nimbly dancing; the poor toiling wretches’. A debate between Mistress Custom and Mistress NewCome over Christmas, by contrast, uses the language of misrule to describe the ‘tatterdemallions’ who have banned the festival.

  But despite all this, the overall pattern of churchwardens’ accounts suggests that most were willing to conform, albeit sulkily. True, many wistful pamphleteers and poets lamented the passing of the old ritual year. But they did think it had passed, at least in areas held by Parliament, a category that ultimately included everyone. True, the government had to keep insisting that Christmas should not be celebrated, but this was at least partly because celebrating Christmas had become a fine way of thumbing one’s nose to the government. Many parishes in the West, East Anglia and Cheshire went on celebrating communion at Christmas, and at Easter and Whitsun too, but historian Ronald Hutton decisively shows that if the republic had lasted ten years longer, the old festive calendar would have been dead beyond recall. Christmas was killed at Naseby fight, mourned a popular ballad, ‘The World is Turned Upside Down’, to be sung to the tune of ‘When the King Enjoys His Own Again’. John Taylor later sneered at those for whom ‘Plum Pottage was mere Popery, that a collet of brawn was an abomination, that roast beef was anti-Christian, that mince pies were relics of the Whore of Babylon, and a goose or a turkey or capon were marks of the Beast’. But his very sneering recorded their triumph. Sir John Oglander complained that the Isle of Wight had become ‘a melancholy, dejected, sad place – no company, no resort, no neighbours seeing one another’. Festivals and processions had been replaced by sermons and fasts. The new calendar would have wiped out all public traces of the old if the regime had survived longer. In this sense, Cromwell actually saved Christmas by dying opportunely.

  Christmas returned with Charles II, and Samuel Pepys remarked on his London church, all decked with rosemary and bay, while the Verneys in 1664 were congratulated on the prospect of keeping ‘the best Christmas in the shire’, for which they had ‘bought more fruit and spice than half the porters in London can weigh out in a day’. The war had left no trace, except perhaps a little extra excess, a little added relish for what is still the chief national holiday.

  XII The Queen’s Tale: Henrietta Maria

  On 30 March 1643, in a former palace in London, an act of iconoclasm was performed that seemed to condense the ferocity and misery of all of them. The story begins before the war. In the spring of 1622, the Archduchess Isabella commissioned a large painting of the Crucifixion from Rubens to give to Sir George Calvert. He in turn presented it to the Duke of Buckingham. Finally it came to rest in Henrietta Maria’s chapel at Somerset House, a move which sealed its doom.

  In 1643, Parliament – or at any rate, sixty members of it – voted to arrest Henrietta’s Capuchin friars, and also destroy the contents of her private chapel. Accordingly, on 30 March, Holy Thursday, Henry Marten and the half-mad Ulsterman John Clotworthy entered the Great Court of Somerset House. Two French aristocrats met them and insisted that the chapel was protected by the queen’s marriage treaty, but Henry Marten was not the man to be troubled by this sort of consideration. He ordered his troops to batter down the doors of the friary and arrest any Capuchins. John Clotworthy and his troops burst into the chapel.

  Clotworthy was a member of the Long Parliament, a fighting Ulsterman who had a sister married to John Pym. He was a passionate Presbyterian who had been working to cleanse Ireland from the taint of popery that for him disfigured it. He is said to have remarked that ‘the conversion of the papists in Ireland was only to be effected by the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other’. Eagerly, this fierce man and his troops made straight for the altarpiece, a twenty-foot Rubens painting of the crucified Christ. Clotworthy clambered up the altar to reach it. He called for a halberd, and struck the painted image of Christ’s face ‘with terrible words’, then struck the face of the Virgin, ‘and then, thrusting the hook of his halberd under the feet of the crucified Christ, he ripped the painting to pieces’. The fragments were thrown into the Thames.

  So perished the only picture of Christ’s death on the cross that Rubens ever painted.

  The Rubens altarpiece was singled out for special treatment. The careful Parliamentarian inventory of 1649 shows that over thirty paintings remained in the chapel, at that late date. Admittedly, the Rubens was large and obvious, and it was an image of Christ; these were particularly targeted by iconoclasts. But there was another, more subtle reason for its destruction. Two surviving works by Rubens might help us understand the impact this lost painting made. Rubens’s Crucifixion of St Peter depicts the saint with brutal realism, all distended muscles and mouth gaping in agony. Furious soldiers, their bodies also bulging with power, are absorbed in their own ferocity, while the saint stares directly at us. The other relevant painting is Rubens’s triptych of the elevation of the cross, depicting Christ with similar and extreme muscularity; even the gouts of blood which pour down his arms are powerful and exuberant, and the entire painting is dynamic, with the executioners wrestling the cross, struggling to make it upright; its muscular sadism is powerful and disturbing. It’s influenced not only by Tintoretto, but by the Laocoön sculpture that was becoming one of the must-sees in Rome, and by Caravaggio’s treatment of light. A muscular Christ like this seems hypermasculine compared with the slender, feminine Christs of the late Middle Ages.

  The iconoclasts may have sensed the pagan overtones of Laocoön and the controversial homoeroticism of Caravaggio. What was especially disturbing was that Rubens had used both traditions to make religion and spirituality grossly physical, in a way that still intimidates us today. Rubens’s Christ is very truly made flesh. It is his way of saying something about the place of art in religion, something defiant – he is insisting that it is through art – realist art – that the incarnation of Christ can be made visible – can almost be repeated by the artist. This was a direct and perhaps a conscious challenge to the Reformers’ views.

  There was a final reason for the iconoclasts’ fury. Both Marten and Clotworthy were educated men, and the very name Rubens may have reminded them of what they hated, what they wanted to crush.

  Henrietta Maria was especially associated with Rubens. Like her astute and very unpopular mother, Marie de Medici, she hired the best, the most showy and brilliant painters. In particular, she favoured Rubens’s elegant combination of playful mythologizing with absolute and luminous reality. He had, after all, worked for Marie de Medici as well, creating a cycle of myth for her in 1625, which was ready for her daughter’s wedding to Charles. And Henrietta copied the Rubens depiction of her mother’s Amazonian costume in rich, carnation colours for one of her court masques, a masque at which her mother was present, the oddly ominous Salmacida Spolia.

  It was probably in 1625 that Rubens met Buckingham, who had come to France to collect Henrietta; the painter sensibly loathed him, and wrote astutely, ‘When I consider the caprice and arrogance of Buckingham I pity the young king, who, through false council, is needlessly throwing himself and his kingdom into such extremity. For anyone can start a war when he wishes, but he cannot so easily end it.’

  However, Rubens’s political views did mean he was happy to act as a peace envoy to try to broker what he himself called ‘the English peace’ with Spain. As a result, he came to London at the beginning of June, and lodged with the dubious Balthasar Gerbier, a portrait painter. Rubens’s mission made him an unpopular figure in some court circles, especially the French Protestants and those eager to support the Elector Palatine against the Spanish. In return, Rubens noticed that many of the nobles had inadequate incomes, and were willing to sell themselves for ready money. Less sourly, he relished ‘the beauty of the countryside, and the charm of the nation; not only for the s
plendour of the outward culture, which seems to be extreme, as of a people rich and happy in the lap of peace, but also for the incredible quantity of pictures, statues and ancient inscriptions which are to be found at this court’ (August 1629). He was impressed by Buckingham’s and Arundel’s collections, but especially by Charles. In 1625, Rubens had hailed Charles as ‘the greatest amateur of painting among the princes of the world’, while Charles gave Rubens a knighthood. He also commissioned a painting of St George and the dragon from Rubens, in which the saint has Charles’s features, and the princess those of Henrietta Maria.

  The setting is the Thames Valley, with London visible in the distance. The Banqueting House can be seen clearly, so that Charles’s role as innovator and sponsor of new styles is on display; this is also a kind of advertisement for Rubens’s own panels, which adorned its ceiling. This suggests that the picture as a whole represents Charles as the defender of beauty against ugliness. Henrietta’s glowing youth and beauty rise above images of darkness and destruction; for Rubens, Charles was rescuing Beauty itself from the wars of religion. It was eloquent of the baroque, the world of exceptional excess combined with odd restraint.